Workbench

09/26/2008

Conservatism Is the New Communism

Any pure ideology is dangerous. When Communism died, there were people who blamed not Communism itself, but the Soviet system. If it had just been more purely Communist instead of Leninist, they reasoned, it would have worked. That kind of purism leads, inevitably, to Stalin's purges and Mao's Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge's slaughter of anyone so bourgeois as to wear glasses -- genocide in service to ideological purism. If we could just get rid of the complainers and non-believers...

Among Conservatives, there's a faction that is displaying exactly the same people-be-damned drive toward ideological purity that made Communism so reprehensible. There are those who look at the significant marketplace failure that's going on today and their conclusion is: if we could just be more purely capitalist all would be well.

While they're not on-board the genocide train yet (though they seem to be tempted by eugenics) they're starting to show a certain disinterest in the real-world effects of their quest for ideological purity. Politco is reporting that the House Republicans who torpedoed negotiations over a solution to our pending economic collapse are basically of the belief that their ideology is so important that economic collapse may be a small price (for others) to pay for it's implementation:

According to one GOP lawmaker, some House Republicans are saying
privately that they’d rather “let the markets crash” than sign on to a
massive bailout.

“For the sake of the altar of the free market system, do you accept a Great Depression?” the member asked.

The inhumanity of Capitalism is that it's incentives are both positive and negative. I don't go to work every day just because I want nice things; I also go to work because I want to be insulated from horrible things like living in a box under a bridge or seeing my children starve. For capitalism to work, it needs both sets of incentives and society has to accept a certain amount of suffering and inconvenience.

Under normal circumstances, our basic political argument is about how much suffering and inconvenience is acceptable. Conservatives are, generally, more accepting of the suffering and inconvenience of the marketplace than liberals, and there's no doubt that suffering and inconvenience are powerful and necessary motivators. Creative destruction is one of the great engines of prosperity and an inevitable result of freedom.

But consider the above quotes. These are Republicans who have been repeatedly elected to public office, not fringe outsiders ranting on a public thoroughfare. They're influential and respected within the party, and they'd accept not just an economic downturn but another Great Depression for the sake of ideological purity. They look at 25% unemployment and a 42% drop in the output of goods and services and the evaporation of just about everyone's life savings not as a horror, but as just one of those things that happens every now and then, perhaps even as something we deserve for being so damned moderate.

Communists, it should be noted, hated Capitalists but reserved their greatest scorn for Liberals, who they saw as corrupt compromisers. Much like today's Conservatives, they spent a great deal of time and effort excoriating pragmatists and their disgusting tolerance. One of the emotional animators of the Russian Revolution was hatred of those willing to meet halfway, to seek impure solutions. In that sense, Lenin was not much different from Rush Limbaugh.

The Republicans who demand an ideologically acceptable solution to the economic problems we face, the Republicans who admit up-front that their chosen pure solution may be no solution at all, imagine a wildly different country than the United States has been for the last 60 years -- a period of time when the United States has flourished like no other country in the history of the world. These are the same people, I'd bet, who are perfectly comfortable with the United States torturing terror suspects, building an armed fence along our southern border to keep out immigrants, setting up government commissions to ban books and movies they don't like, and forcing gays back into the closet at gunpoint. All of those were, of course, mainstays of Communism.

Their belief system may have nothing in common with Communism, but they, themselves, have everything in common with Communists. They care nothing for this country or its inhabitants and everything for their dear ideology. They'll volunteer others to sacrifice whatever is necessary for the sake of the advancement and preservation of that ideology.

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These are Republicans who have been repeatedly elected to public office, not fringe outsiders ranting on a public thoroughfare. They're influential and respected within the party, and they'd accept not just an economic downturn but another Great Depression for the sake of ideological purity.

I'm the last guy here who thinks that you are a political partisan for the sake of partisanship. But the actions taken by senate republicans are exactly the reason I once identified myself as a republican.

This is not a rescue of the american economy, its toast anyway. This is little more than a life preserver thrown to the uber wealthy as reward for gaming the system for so long. It won't do what they claim and allows Hanks bandits to rob you blind during both the real estate run up and real estate crash. They will get to cherry pick all the good and stick the taxpayer will the trash. That was the result of the Savings and Loan bailout and it will be the result of this one as well should it pass. Hank fucking Paulson down on one knee coaxing Nancy Pelosi out of her panties....theres a sobering image...we used to have more dignity.

Wouldn't you really want the government to have access to those funds after the crash when they might really do some good!

Try not to let the Hank Paulsons of this world scare you into a bigger mistake.

It is amusing that a free market capitalism group is suddenly emerging in the Republican party. That is certainly not consistent with their past. But the Democrats have been just as guilty as the Republicans in trying to rein in/control capitalism and enforce communistic type ideology.

It was a Republican president who threw out the gold standard. It was a Republican president who mandated wage and price controls. It was a Democratic president who formed the failed Great Society. It was a Democratic president who eased credit for more homeownership and encouraged banks to make riskier loans.

Perhaps we should just let the markets crash, rid ourselves of these current idiot elected officials and maybe then we can just start over in a truly free society after all the chaos ends.

Historically, there have been depressions every 75 years or so. It seems we're overdue for one.

As for the bailout, it's a terrible idea. The profits remain private, but the losses would be socialized. How is this fair--or just? What is right about making the taxpayer pay for private corporations' poor performance? In any case, a bailout would be yet another step towards socialism. I would rather have proper regulation (instead of the PC rules imposed by Democrats on the banks that forced them to make loans to the uncreditworthy) than to take another step into the socialist hellhole our liberal overlords have planned for us.

Oh, and Tom, you're full of horse flop when you say that Commies built fences keep people out: they built them to keep people in. You also seem to have confused the words immigrant and invader. The former are invited and legal; the latter are uninvited and illegal.

> Politco is reporting that the House Republicans who torpedoed negotiations over a solution to our pending economic collapse are basically of the belief that their ideology is so important that economic collapse may be a small price (for others) to pay for it's implementation . . .

It's not about the ideology, it's about the best practical solution. And in this case, the best practical solution may very well be a market crash rather than establishing a precedent of further government intervention.

The reasoning is that this intervention itself may be the cause of future failures of this nature. The expectation that the government will swoop in to fix the problem (with other people's money) will encourage greater and greater heights of unrestricted and unsafe risk-taking.

> They're influential and respected within the party, and they'd accept not just an economic downturn but another Great Depression for the sake of ideological purity. They look at 25% unemployment and a 42% drop in the output of goods and services and the evaporation of just about everyone's life savings not as a horror, but as just one of those things that happens every now and then, perhaps even as something we deserve for being so damned moderate.

Once again, I think it is uncharitable to ascribe their resistance as mere enforcement of ideological purity. They *should* resist the urge to steal hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people to save a few banks.

Screw the most practical solution; I've always believed in Capitalism because it is indeed the most moral system, its results be danged.

But having said that: yes, the big bail-outs so far were indeed the result of too little capitalism. Why? Because our government forced us to help the high-risk losers who voted them into office, on the pretext that there's a certain level of human dignity that all are entitled to and that includes a mortgage.

And now, here we are, reaping the benefits of those toxic loans, because people like Tom berated us for not caring enough and we listened.